The primary was being inspected and the secondary failed.

There were two independent systems.

Ok but downtime isn't the same as failure. Downtime means planes can't take off. Failure means people die.

An more important question is what do they plan to replace it with?

>If this is the case, why was an airport knocked offline due to a cut fiber optic? A safety focused system would have a backup system say satellite or mobile 4G/5G. But they didn't have such.

There is a strong difference between an airport going down and ATC causing and accident.

Uptime isn't safety, they have very orthogonal characteristics.

Ridiculous false dichotomy. The bureaucracy can get in the way sometimes, but ultimately it is about safety, and the FAA has done an amazing job over the past several decades regulating the skies and played a massive role in making aviation as safe as it is. Standards are rigid and very well defined and change slowly because aviation is an industry where mistakes create massive disasters. There is some collateral inefficiency from things moving slow but thats way preferable to the collateral damage that would be caused by "move fast break things".

The assumption that moving slower and more bureaucratically increases safety and reliability is one of the most harmful myths out there.

The FAA doesn't run airports.

You may recall we went on an orgy of firing federal workers and cutting “waste fraud and abuse”. That impacted engineering, operations and boring jobs like finance and contracts. After the helicopter / airliner collision in DC they accelerated a bunch of stuff to show fire and motion.

Backhoes can disrupt connections, but so can failures to pay bills.

Systems like the radar in question often cannot work with broadband and satellite links.

Engineering will not save you from incompetent governance.

The presence of bureaucracy doesn't mean safety isn't the main consideration, it also isn't a given that bureaucracy is a negative in this instance. The safety record speaks for itself: you are safer in a commercial airplane than just about anywhere else you can go.

And "bureaucracy" really means "grift".